Art, trade and perfumes

[AbdesSalaam Attar, Perfumer Composer]

If I had a money tree I would come ……..I would love to see all the bergamot and the italian seas and places… Rome is one of my mother’s favourite places. She was one of the first airline stewardesses after the war for TWA and flew everywhere…. very beautiful…. We have a family recipe given to her in Rome for Spaghetti Bolognaise which is sooo good….. I am still learning from her…. I can’t quite make it like she can but I do get a bit closer it takes a few days to make it really good. …..she used to bring home loads of perfume samples…… (for me ….. nanny & gaga looked after me…. she was very young ………so there the obsession began ….. not so much with perfume more obsession with plant aromatics….. nanny was very keen on naturals and a big influence.
Janita

Ciao Janita
Artists tend to be poor in business, and to further this natural weekness by an inner convinction that trade is not a creative activity but just a matter of numbers and cold calculations.

There is a mystic of trade as there is a mystic of perfume making.

Trade, as a human activity necessary to fulfill human material life is certainly more important than music or perfumery, in the sense that it is much more important that it be sound. You can even call this soundness a survival condition for human life.

I was lately thinking about my experiences as an artist, and about the mystic of art.
Is art the handicraft or the action that brings it into being?
Even before that is not art the inspiration that sustains the action that will bring the handicraft into being?
I say that even before that it is the intention that originates the action that will condition the type of inspiration which is art.

Without intention there is no art, and with the wrong intention there is an external form of art like an empty shell.

This is why art is sacred or is not. “work is love made visible”, this word from Khalil Jibran is the key to the mystic of art as it is to the mystic of trade.

Perfume trade has generated from antichity wealth that have build whole civilisations, you are artist, you love perfumes, compose perfumes and trade in perfumes, you will be a perfumer, and straightness of means will be only a record and an occasion to remember thanking God for his kindness.

Scritto Da – salaam Attar il 25 Marzo 2007alle ore 17:45:17

[JohnO]

The challenge with trade, as you mention, is in perceiving it as a creative enterprise — for a “trade” cannot be touched, smelled, seen or heard. However, its product can certainly be appreciated, and that is not nothing. Perhaps art comes to trade where all parties are enriched by the engagement, versus a more cynical notion that someone must get the better of someone else in the transaction.

JohnO

[AbdesSalaam Attar, Perfumer Composer]

Every action is worth the intention that originates it.
The same is true for every human activity, art, trade, politics ecc…
The aim of art is to make love visible.
The meaning of trade is Service to the people.
It is so obvious to american people that trade means making money. Loosing sometimes money willingly in order to do justice to the people is part of the ethic of trade.
The laws that rule our trade practices have little to do with ethics, and any rule not based on ethics is not human.
Yes, trade, just like art is an abstract concept, but the people they both involve and the good they produce are very palpable.
The good and bad that can be done to humans through ethical or unethical trade are much more important than the ones that can be done through art.
Like the prophets, the true artist receives the inspiration from the angel of revelation, Gabriel, but the just trader is sitting on thrones with the saints.

Scritto Da – salaam Attar on 06 Aprile 2007 13:11:39

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